The government’s move to establish a $496.3 million bottled-water plant is, to put it mildly, disgraceful. As if the Guyana Water Inc (GWI) refill stations were not ignominious enough, here is a state-run entity taking taxpayers’ money to set up a manufacturing concern from which it will sell taxpayers bottled water. This has bait and switch written all over it and serious questions need to be asked and answered beyond the concerns already raised by local manufacturers.
President Irfaan Ali’s argument last week, when confronted on the issue, was that the government has “a duty and responsibility to the people.” This is indeed true, but it surely entails ensuring that citizens have potable water flowing from the taps in their homes rather than having to buy the commodity in plastic bottles.
It was President Ali himself who said just over a year ago: “Taste the water, drink. It is safe and you don’t have to buy bottled water because this is as good.” He was speaking on March 16, 2025 at the commissioning of the $1.35 billion Wales Water Treatment facility in Region Three. At the time he also said: “By the end of this year, 90% of the population will taste the tasteless nature of treated water throughout this country.”
Then in October last year, at the launching of a similar service at Cummings Lodge in Region Four, which cost $1.3 billion, he was quoted as saying, “When you open your tap, you are not just seeing water, you are seeing your taxes at work… your government’s commitment to ensuring that every family, regardless of income or geography, has access to clean, safe, and reliable water.” Speeches like these have been made at the commissioning of virtually every water treatment plant to date and there have been quite a few. So what happened?
There is no disputing the fact that GWI has a responsibility to provide affordable drinking water, but it should be doing so without the additional expense of setting up a bottling plant. The state has no business entering the bottled-water market when its priority ought to be ensuring that the water it supplies through the public system is consistently safe, reliable and affordable.
In a roundabout way, the President sought to make the argument last week that consumers prefer bottled water. But the more important question is why. One obvious reason is that citizens have lost confidence in the water coming from their taps. Many communities continue to experience poor water quality, inadequate pressure, unreliable supplies and, in some cases, inadequate distribution infrastructure. GWI is not delivering fully on its mission and its fundamental obligation to provide safe, adequate and affordable water but instead of working harder to address that, it is pivoting to manufacturing bottled water. There is nothing about this that makes any sense.
On the GWI website, the latest water-quality report available appears to be from May 2018. That report found that only seven of 24 treatment plants (29%) were fully compliant with the World Health Organisation’s drinking-water guidelines for the parameters examined. Seventeen plants, or 71 per cent, were experiencing problems meeting all the specified parameters, with iron being a significant issue at several plants. The report also identified problems involving pH and aluminium at surface-water plants, gaps in chlorine readings and fluctuating microbial quality at three plants. It further noted contamination at several pump stations that required attention. That report is eight years old. One would hope that the situation has improved substantially since then. And if it has, the public should be able to see the evidence.
The absence of more recent water-quality reports on GWI’s website is itself troubling. If the quality of the national water supply has been transformed, publish the results. If there are still deficiencies, tell citizens what is being done about them. Transparency is particularly important when the same institution is proposing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars producing water for sale.
There is also a basic question that has yet to be convincingly answered: where is the evidence that Guyana’s existing bottled-water producers cannot meet local demand?
Local manufacturers have invested in plants, equipment, distribution networks and employees. Banks DIH and Demerara Distillers Limited are among the established producers. The Guyana Manufacturing and Services Association has not rejected the objective of having all bottled water consumed in Guyana produced locally. Instead, it has argued that the government should work with existing producers rather than become their taxpayer-funded competitor.
If imported bottled water is the problem, then the government should first establish why it is being imported and in what quantities. Who approves those imports? What is the actual size of the domestic market? What is the production capacity of existing manufacturers? Are they operating below capacity or at capacity? What additional investment would be required to meet national demand? And what precisely prevents that investment from taking place?
These are not unreasonable questions. They are the questions that should have been answered before $496.3 million of public money was allocated to the project.
President Ali himself previously spoke of cooperation with the private sector and shared production infrastructure, including standardised bottle manufacturing. That approach appears far more consistent with the government’s stated commitment to private-sector-led growth than creating a state-owned enterprise that competes directly with companies that have already invested their own money in the sector.
However, and more importantly, the primary focus should be the unmet needs of GWI. These may or may not include treatment-plant upgrades, water-quality monitoring, replacement of deteriorating infrastructure, expansion of distribution networks, improving water pressure, addressing contamination, upgrading pumping capacity or extending reliable potable water to communities that still lack it. That would be an investment in the very problem that created much of the demand for bottled water in the first place.
Instead, the government is unashamedly informing citizens that it is prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars bottling water for sale while GWI still struggles to provide the water it already has to households consistently and with the confidence that citizens should be entitled to expect.
The issue is not whether bottled water has a place in Guyana. It does. Bottled water is necessary in emergencies, for travel, for communities without reliable supplies and for consumers who prefer it. The issue is priority.
This government should be wary of solving a symptom while leaving the underlying problem insufficiently addressed. If people buy bottled water because they cannot trust the water from their taps, the answer cannot ultimately be to create a government-owned bottled-water company. The priority must be to make the tap water so safe, reliable and affordable that bottled water becomes a choice rather than a necessity.
President Ali promised this nation water security prior to the 2025 general elections, which saw him reelected for a second term. That he would now tell Guyanese that they will be able to buy cheaper bottles of water is damning.
Then there is also the environmental question. Bottled water is overwhelmingly packaged in plastic, and there is no recycling facility in this country. Plastic bottles are already clogging drainage canals, and other waterways. Millions of pieces of plastic waste end up in the ocean every year. Is the plan to simply continue to add to that? Why isn’t there a push for getting to a place where we could dramatically reduce reliance on bottled water?
The irony is difficult to miss. After years of investing in a national water system so that Guyanese can turn on a tap and drink safely, the government is now asking them to applaud an investment in plastic bottles of water they must pay twice for. If the public water system is working, the plant is difficult to justify, even harder if it is not working.
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